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Do Publishers Underestimate Techies?

Headline: Killing Page View is SuicidePublishing experts have proclaimed that the death of the ‘page view’ is near. This consensus is heated by the adoption of a new Web development technique called AJAX, but AJAX holds hidden dangers for publishers.

Or, we could just use mod_rewrite to create unique URLs for each AJAX page. Problem solved. (Or, we could focus on possibly more useful metrics, like unique visitors, revenue generated, ads viewed…)

If Google has taught us anything, it’s that throwing a bunch of PhDs and engineers at hard technical problems can yield great results. The technical problems aren’t the hard ones, it’s the human problems that are hard.

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Sadly, they’ve conflated what the metric measures with the name we use to refer to the metric. Page-views don’t measure pages. They measure interactions with content.

Whether those interactions are passive (reading an article, watching a video) or active (rating products, searching), the brilliance of Ajax is that you can achieve multiple, measurable interactions on a single “page”.

Ajax is publishing nirvana.

We definitely have to focus on more useful metrics.

(As a side note, everything in the virtual world can be measured and tracked in more ways than we can possibly analyze, and ajax requires we have better metrics. It’s odd how the ad industry always gets nervous when the publishing industry is required to keep better track of what does and doesn’t work. Maybe I’m being snarky. Maybe.)